From a recent report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):
Each month, the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] furnishes SSA [Social Security Administration] with automated death records. Before SSA terminates benefit payments or records death information on the Numident [a major SSA database], SSA employees must independently verify the VA death information. In April 2016, we obtained data from VA identifying approximately 17 million deceased individuals. We matched the VA data against SSA’s payment records to identify potentially deceased beneficiaries in current payment status. ...
SSA issued payments to 3,925 beneficiaries who had dates of death in VA’s records. Our audit results indicated that at least 11 percent of these beneficiaries were alive, and death information in VA’s records was erroneous. However, our audit results also indicated that at least 19 percent of these beneficiaries were deceased , and death information in VA’s records was accurate....
You can see Social Security's problem. They're receiving a lot of bad information from VA. Mistakenly declaring someone dead when they're not is a very bad thing. Not only are their Social Security benefits ceased, their bank accounts and credit cards are frozen and they can no longer receive medical care. Social Security has to independently confirm that the person has died. That can take a little time and mistakes will be made. In the end, even though Social Security received 17 million death reports from VA, OIG could only identify 19 cases where individuals had died but benefit payments were continuing. Nineteen out of 17 million is actually a pretty good record. That's an error rate of 0.00011% if my math is correct. Of course, the right wing Washington Times accuses Social Security of incompetence.
9 comments:
That's 19 percent of the cases, 19 out of the sample 100 cases.
I highly doubt the Washington Times is a right leaning paper.
That's still very good - paying 0.0044% erroneously. However, to be fair, it says "at least" 19%. Since 11% were verified to be alive, it could be 89% really dead, which would mean 0.02%. Still not bad. But notice that the audit only accounted for 30% of the beneficiaries, so it must not have been easy to determine whether they were alive or dead. They prevented over 400 people from being wrongly declared dead - if they made a few mistakes the other way, that's fine with me.
What planet are you on?
I love how the Washington Times glossed over the fact that hundreds of people the VA said were dead were alive. What would the Times have written had SSA terminated the benefits to those people?
The Washington Times is indeed a right leaning newspaper, I'm not sure how that fact becomes a question. One of my jobs was section chief of the federal interfaces and the VA systems made SSA's look futuristic. But the pressure to avoid mispaying people from folks like the IG and Policy pretty much said that the the benefit versus the error related problems meant that we'd do the interface the best we could and let the field sort it out. (Not saying that was the attitude to have, but it was the attitude management had.) Regarding the VA systems feeding us cr*p, there was more than a few times folks in Systems identified when the VA made unannounced changes or even identified errors that the VA didn't know they were making on their end. But one can only do their jobs for them for so long, no? But SSA has far too many times adjusted on the fly to fix or ameliorate VA screwups in that interface. I just don't see how an error on the VA side is made out to be SSA's error. (And ps, the VA for a very long time, despite having free access to SSA's death master file, refused to use it. That's gospel.)
I just read somewhere that talked about this but the other source said SS paid out 38 million to deceased recipients and most of the money they never recover!
I think one of the main issues everyone is missing is the fact that SSA indicated that in most cases from the 100 sample cases, that the VA did not report the death information to the agency. If the agency is not notified of a death, it can not take action on the record. Everyone is automatically making it an SSA error, when in fact, there is a flaw in VAs reporting of death information to SSA.
We work with many VA SSI beneficiaries and we've actually had this issue with several people. They have been declared deceased and have had their benefits revoked. It's a pain to try and prove they are still alive and need benefits as odd as that is.
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